A Smith family tree at last!

For I long time I've wanted to publish a more extensive Philip Smith tree and had hoped to recruit a researcher who might submit one. This month I finally sat down and was able to collect enough census and other documentation to identify many more of Philip's descendants. They now have their own page under Family Trees. While I never enter genealogical data based solely on another family tree, the trees published by several people online certainly helped speed up the process by pointing me in the right direction.

I've never been able to identify the exact crossing taken by Philip and his family to America. Most of his siblings came in July 1829 and settled first near Pottsville, PA. We know Philip was in the area around the same time because he married his wife (from Catawissa, PA) there about 1830. Later records mention 1832 as the year he migrated to Ohio, and it's likely his family traveled west with the entire Schmitt clan. This almost certainly corresponded to the building of the National Road, completed to Columbus in 1833.

Both Philip and older brother Friederich took the surname Smith almost immediately on arrival in this country, reflecting an eagerness to assimilate and probably anti-immigrant sentiment as well. But while Friederich's sons and grandsons reverted to Schmitt, Schmidt, or Schmith, all of Philip's male descendants retained the Smith name. This is even reflected in the names shown on Friederich's and Philip's respective gravestones. So why might this be? Friederich lived in Columbus where, by the time of the Civil War, fully one-third of the inhabitants were German. I doubt this was the case in rural Marion County, where the pressure to conform to English-speaking culture was almost certainly greater. It reminds me of other rural ancestors who anglicized the spelling of their name (Kaiser to Kizer) or adopted an English name having the same meaning (Kraft to Power).